Post Office contacts hundreds of former staff over wrongful prosecutions

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https://inews.co.uk/news/post-office-co ... TO=newsnow

The Post Office confirmed it is contacting about 540 people with potentially relevant convictions

The Post Office is contacting hundreds of former sub-postmasters who may have been wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting.

Dozens of post office workers were convicted, and some were imprisoned, because of flaws in the Post Office’s defective Horizon accounting system.

Last month, 39 former post office workers had their convictions quashed by the Court of Appeal.

It followed six other convictions that were overturned in December, in the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice.

Barrister Flora Page, who represented three appellants, said letters now being sent to the 540 former sub-postmasters and sub-mistresses was a “direct result of the resounding judgment in the Court of Appeal”.

Ms Page told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that a judge-led inquiry into the scandal is required.

She added that the current government-led inquiry was “not empowered” to “do what it needs to do”.

Some of the convicted workers were sent to prison.

Others lost their livelihoods and their homes and were shunned by their communities.

Many went bankrupt and some died before their names were cleared.

The Post Office confirmed it is contacting about 540 people with potentially relevant convictions and additional information is being sought in another 100 cases.

Between 2000 and 2014 the Post Office prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses based on information from the faulty Horizon system.

It wrongly showed shortfalls in the post office workers’ account.

The clearing of the names of the 39 former staff was hailed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who called the original convictions an “appalling injustice”.

When Ms Page was asked if others including Horizon’s developers, Fujitsu, should be held to account, she said: “I think there will be malicious prosecution claims.”

She added: “That’s one of the reasons why the Post Office contested the appeals in the way that they did.

“They only accepted the limited argument. They didn’t accept the wider argument that their prosecution regime was an affront to the public conscience.

“And they resisted that because they had an eye to the fact that malicious prosecution claims would be coming down the line and of course not just the 39, but now as we see it, hundreds and hundreds of them.”

She said of the quashing of the convictions last month was a “happy day” for her clients and all of the 39 she added that it “isn’t enough”.

“There must be more and there will be more to come, not just in terms of compensation for the victims, but also in terms of accountability for those who did this to them.”

A spokesman for the Post Office said: “The Post Office sincerely apologises for serious historical failures. We continue to take determined action for people affected.

“The Post Office has made strenuous efforts to identify individuals who were historically convicted and an extensive post-conviction disclosure exercise is taking place to identify and disclose all material which might affect the safety of those convictions.”